Lynn MacDonald
On Friday afternoon, late, I went with John and Sam down to Rattail to
meet the train. When it came thundering, snorting up, I thought of the
last time that Sam and I had met a train together, and of how our
entire world had changed in the two months. Was it going to keep on
changing, I wondered. I could not bear to look into the past; I found
that I did not dare to try to think into the future.
Just before the train stopped, with its usual roar of protest against
Rattail, Clarence Pette swung off it. He came over to us with a timid
air, like an animal just learning to eat out of a person’s hand. He
took no risks, until Sam had greeted him, real pleasantly, and
politely.
“Miss MacDonald is on this train,” he said to Sam and me. “Is there
anything else I can do for you?”
“Not a thing, if you are positive that she is Miss MacDonald, except
to take your fifty—here it is—and vamoose.”
“I’m positive. Thanks. Here she comes now.”
I looked up to see her coming. I could hardly believe my eyes. I don’t
know what I had expected; but I surely had not expected anything to
get off that smoke-dirty train, in the middle of a Nevada desert, on a
sweltering hot July evening, that looked as she did.
In the first place, in her pongee silk dress with coat to match, and
perky little green hat, she looked as if she had been fresh picked, in
the last nice California garden, and had been kept under glass, on ice
ever since. But that was only a part of it. She looked, too, like
linen sheets feel, at the end of a long hard day; sheets that have
been hand-washed, and sun-dried, and dew-dampened, and ironed smooth
as satin. She looked like very early on a September morning, in our
mountains—that was the zip and the zest of her, combined with her
comforting freshness and cleanness.
She was tall; taller than most women, and with weight enough to look
durable and useful, but not a mite fat. She had eyes that were as gray
as pussywillows, and that did no monkey-tricks of changing to green or
blue; she had wavy carrot-colored hair, that was so full of life it
looked as if it were trying to break the bonds of its neat, boyish bob
and go floating off, on its own, to make maybe a tiny sunset cloud.
Her nose was small; her mouth was a mite too large, showing freely in
a smile her teeth, little and polished white, like a puppy’s.
Coming straight from San Francisco, she used no visible cosmetics;
which is much the same as if I had said, rising out of the Pacific
Ocean, she was as dry as a chip. But you could no more imagine Lynn
MacDonald stopping anything, much less herself, to peer at her
freckled nose in a vanity-case’s mirror, than you could imagine a
baseball player stopping between first and second base to take his
temperature with a clinical thermometer.
All of this general satisfactoriness, coming through the alkali dust
and offering to shake hands with a person, was, I might say,
disarming. My impulses were all mixed. I felt like putting my old,
muddled head down on that nice high chest of hers and having a right
good cry. And yet, I felt for the first time in days, like a broad
grin. I managed it, and forewent the other.
Her voice was low and pleasant, but there was something brisk and
crisp about it, and about all of her, that seemed to say plenty and
plenty of time for everything, but not one precious minute to waste.
In the background, during this meeting, John and Danny had been
hugging and kissing, as if the rolling train right behind them, filled
with staring people, were a peaceful, flowing river, and the people
fishes that were swimming past. At last, to my relief, they came over
to join us; Danny, looking paler and more snuffed out than usual, by
contrast, maybe, with Miss MacDonald; John beaming with triumph at
having her home again.
“But,” Danny said, after Sam had introduced her to Miss MacDonald, and
had explained why Miss MacDonald had come, “you didn’t tell me that
you were coming here.”
“You girls get acquainted on the train?” Sam asked.
“We had breakfast together in the diner this morning,” Miss MacDonald
answered.
“Did you know who I was?” Danny questioned.
“It was my business to know that, wasn’t it?” Miss MacDonald smiled.
“Only—why didn’t you tell me?” Danny persisted.
“I don’t wonder that you ask,” Miss MacDonald said. “And I hope that
you will forgive me for seeming unfriendly, secretive. It is, simply,
that I never want my first history of the case to come from the
nearest relatives. Of course they feel too deeply to see clearly.
Mistaken impressions are so hard to eradicate, that I go to any
lengths to avoid them. If I had made myself known this morning, Miss
Canneziano, I should have had to seem more rude and ungracious than I
seemed by acting as I did. Because, please,” she included all of us in
her glance, “I have to ask each of you not to talk to me about the
case. I should have to refuse to listen. When I need to know anything
about it—I shall need to know many things—I’ll ask it, as a direct
question. Until I ask for more, from you, if you will all do that,
simply answer my questions, you will help me immeasurably.”
“That’s easy,” Sam said.
“I am afraid,” she answered, “that it won’t be easy. And I have to
make another request that won’t be easy to fulfill, either. It is,
that no one will question me. I am sorry to have to ask that. I am
afraid that it seems as if I were trying to surround myself with a
glamour of mystery—pretending to false wisdoms and acumens——”
“Not a bit of it,” Sam interrupted. “‘He travels the fastest who
travels alone.’”
“I have always questioned that,” she said. “At any rate, I don’t
intend to travel all alone.”
“You mean you are going to take a few days to size us up, and then get
some of us to help you?” Sam asked.
“Question number one,” she said, and laughed, too.